37-32 61st Street, Woodside, NY 11377
The office
Five people, what each of them works on, and the thing this page says instead of listing credentials.
Founder, and the person who reads the difficult ones
Elena opened the office above a travel agency on 61st Street with a scanner and a kitchen table, on the theory that the people queueing at the consulates in Manhattan mostly lived out here. She still takes the documents nobody else can read — the handwritten register entries, the carbon copies, the pages that came out of a fire — and she is the one who says no when a document will not do.
Documents, and everything that has to reach an official
Tomasz runs the certified side: the birth certificates, the police records, the transcripts and the long grind of getting a document through a notarial signature and an authority's desk without it coming back. He keeps a list of which offices have asked for what over the last two years, which is the nearest thing this trade has to institutional memory.
Legal and corporate work
Ana came from ten years of in-house work on cross-border supply agreements and has the habit it leaves: she reads the schedules first. Most of the contract and judgment work goes through her, and she is the one who insists on the original term in brackets when an English word would import a concept the source language does not have.
Interpreting, and who goes where
Dimitris books the interpreters and does most of the briefing, which he says is the job — an interpreter who has read the names, the documents and the purpose before walking in is a different professional from one who has not. He interprets himself two or three days a week and takes the appointments nobody wants at short notice.
The counter, the deadlines and the post
Priya is who you speak to, and she is the reason things arrive. She keeps the deadline board, chases the authority when a document stops moving, and tells people at the counter what a document is rather than what to do about it — a distinction she is stricter about than anybody else here.
Nobody here holds a credential, and that is the decision. Nobody on this site is described as a certified, accredited, licensed or sworn translator, and no professional body, register or commission number appears anywhere on it. That is deliberate. These are invented people, and a credential is the one thing a demonstration must never invent — it is the claim that is hardest for a reader to check and easiest for a website to make.
This is also the place on a real company's site where those things belong, so here is what to ask a company you are actually about to instruct: who will translate your document and what their background in the pair is; whether the certificate names an individual or only the company; if you are being sold notarisation, the commission number of the notary who will perform it; and whether there is professional indemnity insurance behind the work. A company that answers all four plainly is telling you more than any badge on a home page does.
The reason this matters more in translation than in most trades is that there is no licence in this country to hold or to lack. Anybody may translate anything and anybody may certify it, so a badge on a home page is doing all of the reassuring and none of the work. The four questions above are the ones that get an answer a badge cannot give you.
Every one of these is the thing that person has an opinion about, and every one of them is worth more to somebody at this counter than a list of qualifications would be.
Italian · French · Civil records
Ask her about the marginal notes on a French birth extract. She will tell you they are the half of the document that says what happened to the person afterwards, and that she has twice found a divorce nobody had mentioned.
Polish · Czech · Slovak
He will tell you that the commonest reason a filing is delayed is the short-form certificate, and that nobody is ever told which form to ask for until after they have paid for the wrong one.
Portuguese · Spanish · Contracts and judgments
Ask her which clause causes the most trouble. She will say the notice provision, every time, and then explain what happens when a deadline runs from a date nobody agreed on.
Greek · Bulgarian · Booking and briefing
He will tell you that the hardest assignment in this profession is a conference speaker reading a written paper at speed, and that the second hardest is a joke.
Scheduling · Authorities · Getting it back to you
She will tell you to order one more signed copy than you think you need, because an office that keeps your copy does not give it back and the second one costs a fraction of a second job.
A photograph is enough to quote from. Or work out the figure yourself first — the estimator shows its arithmetic rather than only its answer.